That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 1:56 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: That newfangled Journal thing by bferrell
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

I'm curious: what will be broken? Syslog will run as it always has.

The fact that other operating systems don't do well with messaging doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do better.

I still have not advocated for the Journal's adoption. But I remain glad that people are willing to take a stab at improving things in this area.

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That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 2:35 UTC (Mon) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link]

As described journald will be a mandatory code wart on the side of systemd.

As for what will be broken. I expect a lot will be broken in the strongly suggested patch to change all of the user space programs to ad uuids into their log messages. The change is to huge and too vast to prevent tupos from slipping through.

Furthermore their is no indication that such a change will benefit anyone in practice.

In their faq they have already deprecated syslog(3).

Better log messages are mostly a matter of getting the human factors right. I do not see journald doing anything but adding yet another ABI to user space that will have to reasonably be supported forever but that adds nothing of substance, and confuses the issue about how to do a good job of logging messages.

The design appears to have a very high cost to even experiment with, and he design is clearly not thought all of the way through at this point. I see any depolyment of journald as described as achieving exactly the opposite of what it hopes to achieve. That is I see deploying journald as creating an even bigger mess in the logging space then what already exists.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 2:37 UTC (Mon) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (6 responses)

... Wait, did you REALLY just say, in effect, "what could possibly go wrong?"

Others my disagree with me, but by presenting this not once, but twice and in the second instance presenting with a special note of the ideas worthiness, you are in fact advocating for it.

I'm always happy to see discussion of ideas, but the *stuff* that has been coming out of late is sorely lacking in wide discussion. I kind of like the "build it, and they will come" model. Build it, let me play with it and see if it fills a need. Don't write a position paper and tell me I don't know what I'm doing and you have a better idea.

As another poster put it, I'm insulted. Add that to a certain, less than stellar track record...

My question is why is this getting so much "air play"?

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 3:57 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

Because the way of discussing groundbreaking new designs is talking it over in a small(ish) group, look over what the rest of the world has done, implement a prototype and write up the design rationale for the rest of the world to comment on and check out the prototype?

As for Poettering's previous "crimes," they are almost universally used in Linux distributions today, so his crowd must be doing something right, even while you believe it is utter crap... particularly systemd has made my Fedora machines boot up noticeably faster. Sure, radical changes have a large cost, and early versions will probably have severe drawbacks until the design and implementations's wrinkles are ironed out.

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 5:16 UTC (Mon) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (2 responses)

At one time, the whole of the population knew the world was flat and that was accepted... Because it was the majority and widely believed.

At other times heinous things have been done because everyone "knew" it was right for various reasons.

As mama said, "if everyone else jumps off a bridge are you going to do it too?"

On my system (XPS1730, quad core and 4G ram), there is no noticeble improvement in my Suse system boot time. I have no idea what effect system spec have on it. But I mention them for completeness.

I, and many people I know, automatically disable pulse... It's there, unused and more trouble that it's worth. Avahi, asi I said, interesting but adds little value that I can see except to make Linux more Mac Like.

Tell you what, next week, we're going to outlaw gasoline and you have to use this new fuel. Eventually they'll work out the bugs, but in the mean time, sometimes car engines are going to blow up and have to be re-built. But when it's done right, it'll be really cool. How do you feel about that?

Look, I've already invested way to much time in this discussion. I recognize that I have little no influence in this. You do and as a wise man once said, never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrell. You have the barrells and an agenda.

I'm out.

Flat Earth Myth

Posted Nov 21, 2011 14:20 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

At one time, the whole of the population knew the world was flat and that was accepted... Because it was the majority and widely believed.

Yeah, no. Ancient societies (say thousands of years ago) do seem to have mostly presumed the world was flat, to the extent we have any records. Mostly though they just didn't care, why should they? But the Ancient Greeks figured out that a Flat Earth doesn't work, observations from their large and growing empire conflicted with the idea of a flat world.

The Flat Earth Myth (that Europeans didn't realise the world was round until Columbus) is just that, a myth. Crazy people insisting an ancient religious work trumps empirical observation existed in Europe at that time, as they still do today, but they weren't the majority and their ideas had little influence. Educated Europeans from e.g. 1400 would recognise a modern globe as a plausible map of the world although only those with the best knowledge of geography would fail to be surprised by how small Europe is in context.

Flat Earth Myth

Posted Nov 21, 2011 21:54 UTC (Mon) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#Eratosthenes.27...

That newfangled Journal thing

Posted Nov 21, 2011 14:43 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, I've reread my comment for "what could possibly go wrong?"-type statements, but I'm not finding any. Maybe I've not had enough coffee yet?

Clearly there's plenty that can go wrong; I outlined one or two of them in the article. But, then, it's a rare software project that can't go wrong somewhere.

The SCO Group got a lot of airtime; shall I consider myself on record as having advocated for them too?

In fact, a common LWN pattern is to post a brief item when something comes out, followed by a more detailed look. That is what was done here. It also fits into a fairly long series of articles about messaging, which is something I've seen as a problem for some years now.

Still lots of discussion

Posted Nov 24, 2011 23:23 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

The LWN pattern I was naïvely expecting is: a short note with a link gets a lot of comments, then our sage editor writes a wise piece which calms the waters and gets few comments. At this point however the original article has 239 comments, but our editor's take has an astounding 169.

I would say that there is still room for discussion, but (not having read all comments yet) most are still going round and round: Unix good vs Unix bad, PulseAudio good vs PulseAudio bad, Poettering good vs Poettering bad. Very few people are advocating to wait and see what the authors come out with, offering some suggestions in the process -- which is what our beloved editor did in his piece, or at least what i read in it. I am not sure if it is just that people need to vent steam, or some previous sins of Poettering; probably a combination of both. But there is a definite need for more articles on this fundamental issue; most of us will hopefully understand that writing about something critically but with caution is very different from an enthusiastic endorsement. Level-headed requirements, improvements and suggestions are especially interesting since Poettering (aka mezcalero) often reads and comments on LWN. Not on this op-ed though, which I read as a sign of Poettering's maturity.